In the early 1970’s Dr. Albert Mehrabian conducted some experiments which determined that 93% of all communication is non-verbal. There have been other studies that have challenged this number as being overblown, but none have dismissed non-verbal communication as a powerful component of human interaction.

Whether we intend to or not, we send messages to those around us by the way we hold our bodies. Sadly, the majority of us do not have good posture, and so we are fighting an uphill battle against someone’s impression of us.

How did it get this bad?

Chronically bad posture is a pretty common occurrence in modern countries. It is a phenomenon that has developed due to how much the average knowledge worker spends hunched over a keyboard and, more generally, sitting.

There has been a lot of information coming out recently that sitting is the new smoking. Personally, I think that is pretty alarmist. But sitting all day isn’t benign, either.

Just think about a standard day: you sit when you eat, sit when you commute, sit when you work and when you come home at night you sit and watch TV. That’s a lot of sitting.

All of it adds up to rounded shoulders, a head that juts forward and a spine that doesn’t look the way it should.

I’m not going to run through a list of all the pathologies that arise due to poor posture, but I would like to emphasize one thing. Your spine is the information highway of your body. All of your nerves go there and then run up to your brain. If there is a kink in that system, how well does it function?

If we want to be empowered men, then our bodies and brains must be in peak condition so that we can act efficaciously in the world.

Why is good posture important?

As I have mentioned before, humans make incredibly fast subconscious assessments of other people. No matter how much people gnash their teeth and attempt to shame us, there is no way to undo this part of human psychology without serious ‘reeducation.’ Even then, you’d probably still make those judgments but then engage in brutal self-attack to counter them.

Your posture telegraphs a message to the world around you, whether you want it to or not. Slouched shoulders make it look like you are trying to protect yourself from the world. A head that juts forward make people think that you are a dreaded close-talker. The list goes on.

Your goal with having good posture is to make the best impression possible so that your name rises high on the list of potential candidates for a job or a date because the person on the other end has a good psychological feeling about you.

How do you fix bad posture?

The first thing that needs to be done is to take an honest account of your posture. It’s best if you have a full length mirror. Just take a moment and look yourself over. What do you notice?

Most of us will have more than one thing to work on.

Here is a quick step by step guide on how to achieve better standing posture:

Stand with your feet hip-width apart

Plant your feet and externally rotate your knees

Flex your butt to get your hips in alignment

Flex your abs about 20% to bring your midline into alignment

Shrug your shoulders up, pull them back and let them drop

Bring your head into alignment, like there is a string connecting your head to the ceiling

This should get you into a close to ideal standing position. If you have maintained bad posture for a long time, this will be a pretty uncomfortable position as your muscles will not be used to it at all.

If you are interested in working on your postural muscles so that you can more easily maintain good posture here are some good guides: Guide 1Guide 2.

We now live in a society that discourages judgment of any kind. You are told that you can’t make a decision about someone based off of your first impression.

When it comes to immutable factors of a person, such as race, I agree with the sentiment.

However, the notion that we should not make assessments of a person based off of how they present themselves is absurd.

Humans make incredibly fast judgments of other people based off of external clues such as posture, dress and facial expressions.

If you are a professional or want to improve your dating odds it is imperative that you make a good first impression.

Don’t Judge a Book by its Cover

I have never really understood the statement “don’t judge a book by its cover”. It always strikes me that the person who coined it must have never bought a book in their life.

Just think of the times you’ve been in a bookstore. You browse until a title catches your eye and then you peruse the front and back cover to see if the book is of interest to you.

If I was unsure of whether or not I wanted to read a book, reading it all of the way through to see if I like it is a waste of my time.

In much the same way, we as humans make judgments about the people we meet.

This is hardwired into our psychology. It helps us to determine if someone is going to be helpful or harmful, happy or angry. Some of this is based on our past experiences, but the vast majority of our decision is based on visual cues we receive from the other person.

We all have standards for the people we want in our lives and those standards generally correlate to how people present themselves in the world. If you want to hang out with people who are into heavy metal, you wouldn’t go to a Taylor Swift concert.

Our brains create these mental shortcuts to cut down on the amount of processing that needs to be accomplished. It is a useful rule of thumb when it comes to sorting the people we meet.

As you are reading this blog, I am going to assume that you aren’t actively trying to integrate into the underground grindcore scene.

Let’s talk about the two best ways to increase your professional and personal appeal.

The Two Pillars of Physical Appearance: Posture and Apparel

If you really want to make a good impression on people, then you need to work on your posture and your appearance.

I’ll break the two down in more detail in some future posts but let’s cover the basics here.

Posture:

Information work is now the predominant form of work in industrialized countries. Due to this, the majority of us will be deskbound for vast swaths of our working days.

We’ll sit in our cars to and from work.

We’ll sit as we eat our meals and catch up on our shows in the evenings.

This has created an epidemic of armchair warriors with slumped shoulders and curved spines.

These characteristics do not manifest in the world as the markers of a brave conqueror. Rather, they are interpreted as withdrawn, like you are rolling your shoulders in to shield you from the outside world.

This is a weak position and it will be interpreted by others as such whether they recognize it consciously or not.

Notice how whenever a hacker is in a movie it is not a tall, broad-shouldered man but rather a greasy, socially awkward man with poor posture.

In addition to not being a socially strong position, this position will do massive damage over time to your spine. For every inch off of center your head is, you add 15 pounds of pressure to your neck. This will compress your vertebrae until they begin to fuse and create bone spurs.

Apparel:

I think that this is something that most men don’t pay a lot of attention to.

Mastering dressing yourself as a man is a pretty simple task and one that will pay a lot of dividends as so few men do it well.

The biggest thing for a man is just to look clean and presentable. Wear clothes that fit well and are not baggy. Make sure that your clothes are not wrinkled and you collar doesn’t look like a piece of bacon.

Two years ago I moved away from my hometown of Seattle to pursue a master’s degree in Bioscience Enterprise in Auckland, New Zealand. I had finished my undergraduate in biochemistry a few months before, and it seemed like a good next step to pursue a career in biotech.

However, I began to question my decision about a year into my course. I decided to press on, and I made it through six more months before I finally withdrew.

There were some reasons for my decision, so I’ll unpack them for you, and hopefully, you can learn from my experience.

The sunk cost fallacy

There is a beautiful lesson that comes from the field of economics. It is called the sunk cost fallacy.

A sunk cost is something that occurred in the past and cannot be recovered. So, for example, my time that I had invested into the master’s program was something that I could not get back.

The fallacy occurs when we try to make rational decisions about the future while considering these sunk costs. If we were completely rational the sunk costs should not factor into our future decisions since they cannot be recovered.

However, humans on a base psychological level want to minimize losses and tend to focus on the emotional investments we have made in the past. This is what makes us susceptible to the sunk cost fallacy.

This is a fallacy that we all fall into at some point.

I fell into it while considering whether I should leave my program or not. I had already spent a year and a half, what was six more months?

Here’s how I reframed my decision to mitigate the sunk cost fallacy: in six months I could have a degree that I don’t ever plan on using, or I could have a business with cash flow.

I removed the burden of the sunk cost fallacy from my thinking by reimagining my future.

I placed too much emphasis on outcome

Going into the program, I wanted to create a biotech empire and amass huge riches. I still want to amass huge riches, but my strategy has changed dramatically.

My thought process going into the program was that if I could do great work I would become successful and then I could be happy because I’d have more money than I would know what to do with.

The way I think about it now goes more like this: if I can be happy, then I’ll do great work. That great work will lead to great success. I’ll still end up with more money than I know what to do with, though maybe not as much as the first option, and I’ll be happier throughout the process.

I’d rather have a happy life now than to put it off until after 50.

I was letting the context of my life shape my decisions

Throughout my life, I have been incredibly independent. As I have gotten older, that independence has shaped itself into an individualist worldview that is my guiding light.

However, human beings are social creatures, and we are all susceptible to the attitudes of people around us. If we do not make proactive steps to define our lives, our lives will be defined for us by those around us.

I fell victim to this as well.

There is a fantastic line from a Rush song that goes ‘if you choose not to decide you still have made a choice.’ This sums it up perfectly.

Whether we are passive or active in choosing our path in life, choices will be made. Social pressures and expectations of family weigh heavily on all of us.

Everyone around me saw the merits of the program I was in. My fellow students thought I was crazy. My dad reminded me of all of my time invested. My mom reminded me that I had moved away from home to pursue it.

I have had plenty of choices made for me by remaining passive. I’m sure that I haven’t seen the last of them either.

To live life on your terms requires active and vigorous participation. If you do not set your own course others will set it for you.

I was not true to my own desires

As I said earlier, I went into the course with a desire to build a biotech empire and make it big.

By thinking this way, I made a big mistake because I had not unpacked what I truly wanted. It wasn’t the money that I wanted so much as the freedom that money can provide.

I never wanted to work in a corporate salt mine. Mostly because I cannot tolerate incompetence, especially in someone who is higher than me on the corporate ladder.

I also hate bureaucracy with an undying passion. I prefer deep thoughts and quick action, not decisions made by committees.

Yet, through my master’s program, I had signed up for one of the most bureaucratic industries outside of government. The amount of regulation that biotech companies have on them predisposes them to become sprawling bureaucratic nightmares.

…As I said, to put our faith in tangible goals would seem to be, at best, unwise. So we do not strive to be firemen, we do not strive to be bankers, nor policemen, nor doctors. WE STRIVE TO BE OURSELVES.

But don’t misunderstand me. I don’t mean that we can’t BE firemen, bankers, or doctors— but that we must make the goal conform to the individual, rather than make the individual conform to

the goal. In every man, heredity and environment have combined to produce a creature of certain abilities and desires— including a deeply ingrained need to function in such a way that his life will be MEANINGFUL. A man has to BE something; he has to matter.

I linked the whole letter above and it is definitely worth a read. When I read the letter, I was already thinking in the way that Thompson described. Once I read his article I committed to leaving the program (it’s always nice having an external source validate your thinking).

I was trying to jam myself into a goal that I had set myself. I have since made my goal conform to me as an individual. I want freedom. I want to live on my own terms. I am on my way to that reality. You should join me.

We have reached the final, and most important, post in this series. If you are just joining, I recommend going back to the beginning to learn about my framework of personal empowerment.

Mastery is without a doubt the most important part of this framework. Without it, we cannot create value for the world.

There are no shortcuts to reach this stage. What is required is hard and diligent work that moves you closer to your goals.

You Cannot Master Them All

Our first step in mastering a skill is first to unpack a lesson from economics: Every single decision we make is a trade-off.

When it comes to mastering a skill, the trade-off we make is investing time into developing a skill that will provide a living. A lot of the literature surrounding mastery suggests that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to master a skill.

10,000 hours is about 416 days where you are working 24 hours a day. If you work two hours a day, it will take almost 14 years to master something.

Most of us will spend more time than that, but I just want you to see that this is not something that just happens overnight.

Choose Your Skills

I am not here to confirm or deny if it truly takes 10,000 hours to master something. However, if we take that as a rule of thumb, we can start to see that we cannot master all of the skills we want to.

Since we all have a limited number of hours to live, we must choose where to spend our time. This is where the first three steps in this framework will help you.

You need to have a rough idea of where you are going before you go for mastery.

As you move towards your goals, you will naturally have to work on different skillsets. Some will stick with you and others you’ll never use again.

What is important is to work diligently on a skill you want to master once you have identified it.

When deciding which skills to master, I would like to begin with an analogy.

Imagine your skillset as a spearhead.

The skill that you master is going to be the very point of the spear. Without it, your weapon is useless. But if your spearhead doesn’t have the support it needs itwill crumble.

You don’t master one skill to the exclusion of all other skills. The skill that you master will be what separates you from everyone else so choose it well.

All of the other skills that you have acquired will support and add additional value to the thing that you have chosen to master.

How Do You Master a Skill?

Skill mastery does not come about by doing the same thing over and over again.

Mastery comes about through deliberate practice. I’ll do a longer post on deliberate practice in the future but for now, a simple explanation will do.

In essence, deliberate practice is when you stretch your abilities by doing something that is just outside of your comfort zone.

For example: if you want to be a musician but the only song you practice is Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, you will never be a good musician.

Your skill improves as you take on challenges that push you to the next level but do not result in utter failure. The process should be difficult and mentally draining but not completely frustrating.

This aspect of skill mastery is what a lot of people leave out when they talk about doing what you love for a living.

No one wants to pay a shitty woodworker, no matter how much you love woodworking.

Because no one talks frankly and openly about the difficulty of getting to a place where you can do what you love for a living, very few people achieve it.

They send their wishes out to the universe in a vain hope that it’ll come back to them.

I have never been one to leave something to chance and if you are reading this blog you probably don’t either.

I would rather take the sure path of hard work to deliver me to the realm of prosperity than bumble along until 45only to realize I’ve wasted the most productive years of my life.

Conclusion

We have reached the end of the framework that I use to make decisions about where I want to go in my life. I hope that it has been helpful for you.

As a recap I’d like to reiterate what I said in one of my earlier posts:

I think the analogy of a blacksmith is appropriate in this case. But I don’t view my life as a single project. I view it as an armory. Sometimes I need to make a sword, sometimes armor and other times horseshoes and nails.

This is how I think about it in my head: I take the raw material (my biological drivers) and heat them in my furnace until they are ready to be shaped (introspection). I then begin to hammer the metal into the shape that I need it to be (skill acquisition) then I sharpen and polish it (mastery).

While some items like horseshoes and nails don’t need to be polished, they are still a critical component of my work. Without them, I cannot ride my horse to the market and sell my expensive items (okay, I have tortured this metaphor enough).

Most people approach their lives in an unsystematic way and so never really develop a sense of who they are and what they want.

Do not let that happen to you. Try out what I have said and see if it works for you.

Another word of warning: if this system does not work for you do not keep trying in vain to make it work.

Each one of us is an individual, and each one of us needs different tools to reach our goals. If my system does not work for you, find something that does.

In this series, we are going over what I believe is the best way to organize your life. If this is the first entry you are reading I suggest you go back to the beginning as the order is important.

The first stages of this system focus on creating a roadmap so that you are in charge of where your life is headed.

The second portion of this system is about taking that map and following it.

Why Skill Acquisition Matters

We are now firmly in the information era. It seems almost ridiculous to say something so obvious but when our educational institutions act as if we are still in the industrial era the point must be driven home.

Over the span of our lifetime, there will be radical changes in how we work. It is no longer sufficient to go to university and come out waving your degree like it is the golden ticket to prosperity.

If you do that, you will be broke.

If you do that, you will be miserable.

The only way to stay above water in this world moving into the future is a desire to learn and expand your human capital. I explain why in more detail in my article about the death of the career man.

Regardless of how you feel about this, it is reality. We cannot deal with reality as we wish it to be but must engage it as it is.

Do not bury your head in the sand and pretend that you will be fine relying on one skillset.

Identifying Valuable Skills

You now understand why skill acquisition matters. What do you do now?

Very few of us want to travel the same road in life so I cannot give specific advice. That will be up to you to decide where you should invest your time.

As a general rule, however, everyone should learn how to sell. I don’t care what you do in life you will have to sell in one way or another. It is best to get comfortable with it now.

It is also one of the most useful skills to have. If you know how to sell, you will always have a job no matter the economic conditions.

The other bit of advice I can give besides learning to sell is to begin with the end in mind.

People get whipped about by the success of other people because they are unsure of where they are going in their own life.

They are randomly pursuing things that have worked for other people in a vain hope that it will also work for them.

Here’s my suggestion: look at your overarching end goal for your life and work backwards from there.

You want to be the world’s greatest neurosurgeon? Start with that and work your way back into what skills you need to acquire to get there.

Do you want personal freedom? Well you can’t have that if you are the world’s greatest neurosurgeon as you’ll always be on call.

The first two steps in this process should help you to determine where you want to end up. Work backwards from there to identify critical skills. Study other people who have succeeded where you want to succeed and see if their path will work for you.

What do you do when your map is wrong?

There is a fantastic saying that I first heard from Steven Covey that goes “The map is not the territory”.

What this means is that while plans are well and good do not let them override what you are experiencing.

If you’re trying to navigate Seattle with a map of Los Angeles, you will get nowhere fast.

Let’s go back to our neurosurgeon friend.

After a gruelling undergraduate where he ended up at the top of the class, he realizes that his goal of being a neurosurgeon is no longer desirable.

Now he has two options at this point:

Cave to societal pressure and continue on the path to being a neurosurgeon

Redraw his map

This is where most people go awry. They keep using the outdated map to navigate their life.

They drive twice as fast but only succeed in getting lost in half the time.

Then they wake up at 40 and hate themselves.

Do not feel pressured to stick to a map that you created when you were younger if your goals have changed.

I started off my career thinking that I wanted to be a biochemist in a biotech firm. That goal changed dramatically when I realized just how much government interference there is in the biotech sector.

I have made a pretty abrupt shift into being an online entrepreneur. I was only able to do that because I swallowed my pride and admitted that my previous goals had changed.

I then went about acquiring the skills I need to be successful online.

Conclusion

Our world is changing dramatically. The 21st century belongs to those who embrace the lifelong pursuit of knowledge and skill acquisition.

Map out your life using the first two posts in this series. When you have done that, sit down and begin with the end in mind.

You will have mapped out where you want to end up so now you can work backwards and identify the necessary skills to achieving that goal.

However, if that goal changes do not hesitate to alter your map. We have a finite amount of time in this world so do not waste it pursuing things that you don’t want to impress people you don’t like.

As always, if you enjoyed this content feel free to subscribe or enter Amazon through my link to support the blog at no cost to yourself.

In the first part of this series I discussed how in order to move towards the things we want in life we must first understand what we don’t want.

This is radically different from the standard fare out there when it comes to setting and achieving goals.

Here’s why it’s important: if you do not understand what you don’t want in life you have no foundation for future action.

That is a bold claim but keep reading, I’ll justify it below.

Our shared human desires

I just made a really bold claim. Let’s walk through it.

I would bet a lot of money on the fact that the vast majority of us share the things we want to avoid.

No one wants to be fat.

No one wants to be lonely.

No one wants to be poor.

These are deeply rooted desires for reproductive fitness, social acceptance and material comfort. On some level, we all share the same motivations.

The problem with these biological drivers is that if we do not have them well defined in our own minds they can very quickly lead us to envy and a life of unhappiness.

The reason for this is that there is no objective definition for any of the three criteria I listed above. My idea of fitness may be radically different than your own. If you want to be generally fit and I want six pack abs, the way we live our lives will be completely different.

If you don’t know that you don’t want six pack abs, then you’ll feel unhappy that I have them and you don’t.

So how do we avoid these feelings of envy? If we all share the same base desires, won’t we get trapped in a cycle of feeling inferior to those that have succeeded in life more than we have?

Most people do get trapped in that cycle. I want you to break it.

In order to escape we must get our subconscious mind and conscious mind into synergy.

We do that through holding up a mirror to ourselves and inspecting what we want. We create synergy through introspection.

Introspection as a tool for understanding

In my first post I asked you to paint a vivid picture of what you wanted to avoid in life. I asked you to do this because in order to create that picture you would simultaneously have to construct a mental image of your ideal life.

It is the image of your ideal that I want us to turn to now.

The first thing we must do is scrutinize it. Is that ideal image of your future something that you constructed out of your own desires? Or is it something that was influenced by external actors?

This is incredibly important to address as that image is going to be what joins the conscious and unconscious minds together. It is the meeting point between the two minds. It couples the biological drive of the unconscious mind with the rational, forward thinking portion of our conscious mind.

These are the images that we must cling to if we want to live a happy and empowered life. They may change as we age and acquire new knowledge but they must be our guiding light.

Without them, we will be yanked about by every success that people around us have. But if they are flawed and constructed based on external influences they will also lead us down an unhappy road.

This is why we must practice introspection. We must take time to understand who we are so that we can perform the actions that will drive us to our end goals.

The curse of busyness

Currently, modern societies use busyness as social currency. The busier you are the more social weight you carry.

I think that is absolutely monstrous.

Most people go through their lives doing things they hate to impress people they don’t really like to get something that they don’t want. They never stop to take a breath to see if what they are doing is something that they actually want to accomplish.

What a waste of a life. I mean honestly.

Let’s be real with each other for a moment here. I don’t care what religion you subscribe to or what you believe happens to us after we die there is one constant: this life that you are living now is your ONE shot.

Your one shot to do something important and most people spend their time trying to impress other people or keep up with the Jones’.

This is why introspection matters so much. Without it you get sucked into a toxic cycle of doing things you don’t like for rewards you don’t want.

When you take the time to stop and think about your life you can start to say no to the things that do not move you towards your desired ends.

There is a great quote that it attributed to Richard Feynman that goes:

“You have no responsibility to live up to what other people think you ought to accomplish. I have no responsibility to be like they expect me to be. It’s their mistake, not my failing.”

This is the mentality you must adopt if you want to be happy in this life.

How to forge your own destiny

I have always liked to view my life like I’m a blacksmith. I am the master of my own life and I get to shape it with each hammer blow.

However, I don’t view my life as a single project. I view it as an armory. Sometimes I need to make a sword, sometimes armor and other times horseshoes and nails.

This is how I think about it in my head: I take the raw material (my biological drivers) and heat them in my furnace until they are ready to be shaped (introspection). I then begin to hammer the metal into the shape that I need it to be (skill acquisition) then I sharpen and polish it (mastery).

If you skip the introspection portion you will never be able to get the end product you desire. You will hammer away on a raw chunk of iron and that will shatter under your strikes.

Yet this is how most people approach their lives.

They have a general idea of where they want to end up and so they just start beating on the raw material, hoping that it will form the shape that they need. In the end, they destroy their material, exhaust themselves and don’t achieve their aims.

Looking deep inside yourself and finding out where you want to go in your life is the only way you can be truly successful and empowered.

Useful Tools

I have put together some resources to help you with introspection.

The first is an eBook about learning how to be alone and developing a habit of introspection. If this is all new to you I would highly suggest this option. Download your eBook.

Today, I am going to expand on the post I made two weeks ago about creating a coherent framework to achieve your goals.

As I mentioned in the previous post, most of us are pretty bad at meeting the goals that we have set for ourselves. It is not because we are lazy, or didn’t try hard enough but rather the way our psychology operates.

Human decision making takes place upon a spectrum that ranges from pain to pleasure. In fact, the neural pathway for registering pain and pleasure is the same. Neuroscientists believe this to be the case for two reasons:

The brain is lazy and doesn’t waste resources creating two pathways

The activation of one sensation suppresses the other so that we can quickly understand the consequences of an action

This makes sense from a simple observational standpoint. No one cries when they eat ice cream. They may consciously know it’s making them fat, but their subconscious mind is lighting up like a Christmas tree because we are wired to gorge on high carbohydrate foods.

With this knowledge in mind let’s look at some of the typical motivational material around goal-setting. Download a free worksheet so that you can write down the things want to escape in your life as you go through the post.

The Standard Narrative on Achieving Goals

If you have an interest in personal development, you have no doubt come across all sorts of material to get you on the right track when it comes to setting and achieving goals.

The advice ranges from creating a massive vision for your future and plotting it out on a vision board. Somehow, the universe will see this vision board and those things will materialize in your life.

The more pragmatic end of the spectrum encourages the creation of S.M.A.R.T goals. These goals are specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and time-bound.

For most of us, these systems do not work and what ends up happening is a pattern very much like I’ve illustrated. You make some progress over the first week through sheer willpower. You plateau sometime during the second week and then by the beginning of the third week you’re in a free fall where you end up lower than you started because now your ego has taken a hit because you failed.

The typical response from those people who distribute conventional wisdom about goals is that you need to try harder. You need to just get back up on the horse and keep going.

But what if the horse doesn’t know where it is going? What if the horse isn’t a horse at all?

Excuse my poor attempt at humor but the question still stands: what if your approach is all wrong? No one ever questions the systems that have worked for them, but they hardly stop to think about whether what they did would work for the population at large.

The reason why the illustration above hits so close to home for many of us is that we have all been there. We have all struggled to implement the positive changes in our lives.

The standard advice typically fails because it runs straight into our subconscious mind. It attempts to strong-arm a much more powerful portion of the brain into doing something that it perceives as a threat to survival.

Remember, your subconscious mind is not subject to reason. Rather, it is hardwired to get you to reproductive age. Any move away from what has previously been done is a move towards uncertainty.

Any move towards uncertainty is a potential move away from the habits which have kept you alive. This is interpreted by your subconscious mind as a potential threat to reproductive fitness. Your subconscious mind does not like those sorts of moves.

So if this system fails, how do we achieve our goals?

Using Your Fear as Fuel for Personal Empowerment

What I am about to say flies in the face of all of the happy-go-lucky goal-setting gurus. I want you to think about all of the things that you really want to avoid in life. Work up a good mental image about the things you desperately want to avoid.

Some people will deride what I have said because it starts off from a negative place. I take great issue with that. Understanding what you want to avoid in life is just as important as understanding where you want to go. Additionally, to form an idea of what you want to avoid you need an image of the ideal situation to contrast it to.

So many people want to avoid the dark underbelly of human existence. The fear, insecurities, and troubles we all have on our journeys. I prefer to shine a light on them so they wither before me as I walk rather than have them grasp at my ankles, slowing my progress.

We all have our rough edges. Put them to use in driving you forward because when you construct the image of what you want to avoid you also build the image of your ideal situation. How can you tell if something is bad if you don’t have an ideal standard to compare it to?

The goal of understanding what we are trying to avoid is to push us along the path towards our ideal. That pain avoidance will get us far enough down that path of new habit adoption so that we can pivot to pursue our goals without fear of being sucked back down to our previous ways.

So many people fail in achieving their goals because the whole framework is so weak. Just think about the standard goal someone sets:

“I want to lose ten pounds by the end of the month so I can fit into my old ”

That goal fulfils every criterion of the S.M.A.R.T. framework, but it does not spur any of us on to action. Compare that to this:

“I want to lose ten pounds this month because that weight is indicative of poor nutrition, the result of which will lead to a life supported by medication as I age if I am lucky enough not to die suddenly in my 60s”

When your friends are all ordering dessert, which one is going to stop you from joining in?

Conclusion

The goal of this piece is not to scare you to death. It is not to suggest that aspirational goals are not worthwhile.

I want you to achieve all of your aspirational goals. That is why I want you to think about implementing new habits with this system.

You cannot achieve aspirational goals if you can’t even get out of the starting blocks. The purpose of this phase is to identify that which you want to avoid to give you enough momentum to start to create the life you aspire to.

I have been cooking since I was about ten years old. Hands down, it is one of my favorite things to do. However, there are a lot of different kitchen tools out there and it is hard for the beginner to decide where to start.

When I first moved out on my own, the first meals I cooked were absolute nightmares. I ate a lot of eggs, needless to say.

The skill came pretty quickly but what took longer was figuring out what tools I needed to do the job well.

I’ll never forget the time when I put chicken breasts in a slow cooker with a jar of teriyaki sauce. I had just lost my wallet so I couldn’t buy any more food until my new debit card showed up. I went off to class thinking that at least I’d have something to eat when I got home.

When I came back, I had the saltiest teriyaki chicken I’ve ever eaten, and it was because I didn’t know what tool to use for the job. So I had to eat salty teriyaki chicken topped with my salty tears for three days until my new debit card came in the mail.

Below is a list of the tools I would buy in one go if I were to gear out a new kitchen today. They are listed in order from most to least important.

Each item is linked on Amazon for convenience.

Don’t feel like reading? Download a PDF of the list with everything linked through to Amazon.

Without a doubt, this is where you want to spend the most money when it comes to equipping your kitchen. You’ll be using this knife at almost every meal so the investment will pay for itself quickly. This is your go-to knife for everything that you will be tackling as a beginner cook.

The most dangerous thing in your kitchen is going to be a dull knife. You don’t want to be cutting something and have the knife turn out and slice your hand because it is too dull to cut through a tomato. Also, if you try to cut a tomato with a dull knife, you might as well smash it with a rock.

You do not want to be chopping food on your counters for obvious reasons. I prefer cutting boards that are reversible so that I can chop veggies on one side and then flip it over to carve meat. I would also suggest grabbing a couple of cheap ones that you can use for trimming raw meat.

Behind my knives, this is the most utilized cooking tool that I own. It’s great for cooking everything from eggs to meat to veggies. Because it is cast iron, the heat is evenly distributed across the cooking surface. Take good care of it and you’ll be able to pass it on to your grandkids.

The glass measuring cups will be what you use to measure out volumes of liquid. If you’ve ever tried to walk across a kitchen balancing a steel measuring cup full of liquid you know what I’m talking about.

The steel measuring cups are for dry goods and smaller quantities as well. Both are worth having on hand.

Do not skimp on your Tupperware. If you’re like me, then you prepare multiple meals at once. I prefer glass Tupperware because it is microwave safe and I don’t have to worry about any plastics leeching into my foods. If you’re going the plastic route, at least get stuff that is BPA free.

You should have one of these in your kitchen. They’re perfect for soups and smoothies. A note about blenders: I used to think that they were all created the same until I finally coughed up enough money to buy a really good one. A good blender will pay for itself in saved time and frustration. My personal favorite is the BlendTec.

This item is a nice-to-have. It can pretty much do everything you need it to regarding grating, shredding, chopping, and combining. Will it save you a ton of time and effort? Yes. Will your kitchen dream be dashed against the rocks if you don’t have one? No.

If you cook a lot of chickens and roasts like I do this is a worthwhile investment to make. I used to just cook my chickens in my baking dish, and the thighs and legs wouldn’t get crispy because they were resting in liquid for the entire time. Now, I get perfectly crispy chickens every time.

Please excuse my month away from the blog. I managed to get some time to visit home, and I took full advantage of being away.

During my time away I began to think about the way I have organized my life and how I could make it into a general guideline for others to follow. What follows is my attempt to do so. Over the following weeks, I will go dive deeper into each section.

The Foundation: Avoid that Which You Dread

If you have read any literature on goal setting or constructing a vision for your future, you have some experience with the advice that is handed out by nearly everyone. It will typically look something like this:

Make a 3-5 year plan

Visualize your ideal life

Construct a vision board

Get an accountability partner

The trend with the majority of advice out there is that it is future-oriented and aspirational. Unfortunately, this is not how human psychology operates.

Important side note: I am not saying you shouldn’t do the things I listed above. Having goals for your life is important. What I am saying is that if aspirational goals are the foundation you are building your future on you have built your castle on sand.

Here’s the truth about human beings: evolution does not care about what happens to us after we reproduce. The human body is set up to get you to reproductive age and whatever happens after that is just icing on the cake. Because of this, we are pre-programmed to stick with what is safe and what has “worked” for us in the past so we have a higher chance of making it to reproductive age.

Because we are programmed to do what it takes to get to reproductive age, we are more motivated to avoid pain than to seek pleasure.

Understanding this, we can now create a better framework for achieving our goals. Huge, aspirational goals that will be realized in a few years’ time are simply not as motivating as threats to our reproductive fitness.

If you look at this framework as a pyramid, the foundation will be constructed of the things which you most want to avoid in life. This will get your subconscious mind on board with your goals rather than fighting it the whole way through.

Let’s look at an example of how this works. Say you want to lose 20 pounds and you’ve read that a low-carb diet is an effective way to lose weight. Your conscious mind understands the reasons why it works and why you want to lose weight.

However, when you transition to that diet, your subconscious mind perceives that you are starving because the supply of carbohydrate has decreased and so it starts ramping up hunger signals to get you to eat more.

At this point, if you’re trying to lose weight to look good for beach season you are going to throw in the towel. Pitting the conscious mind against the subconscious mind is like putting Taylor Swift in a boxing ring with Mike Tyson.

The best way to get through this stage is to perceive that the extra weight you are trying to lose is a threat to your health to at least get some portion of your subconscious mind to come along for the ride.

Now, taken out of context this framework would seem to create more anxiety than is worth dealing with. I, however, would argue that aspirational goal setting creates even more anxiety when you miss deadlines you set for yourself.

The purpose of the base of the pyramid is to create a motive force to drive you to the higher tiers. I have found that identifying those things that I want to avoid is much more motivating than goals that won’t be realized until I’m 40.

The Second Tier: Introspection

If you have read my blog for any length of time, you know that I am big on introspection. If you’re new to the practice, check out my series on learning how to be alone.

Introspection is a critical component of this framework as it is what will help you determine how YOU want to live rather than taking the path that society wants to point you down. By taking the time to listen to yourself, you develop an idea of how you want your life to unfold.

Once you have determined what you want to avoid introspection will help you to figure out the best way for you to avoid those things.

One of the key uses for introspection is determining your personality type. I have always been an introvert, and I enjoy working on my own. As I became more comfortable with that fact, I began to hate the idea of working for someone else.

I am not saying that your personality locks you into a life path, but when you understand who you are on a base psychological level, you can make an honest accounting of your raw talents and desires. This will help you to make rational decisions about your next steps in life.

For example, as an introvert, I was not predisposed to being a nurse where I am constantly surrounded by people. Could I have become one? Sure, but it would have taken a lot of effort on my part, and I prefer to invest my time into areas that will be multipliers as opposed to a drain on my internal resources.

The Third Tier: Skill Acquisition

I have written before about my belief that the career man is dead, and the new normal is a constant process of skill acquisition. We now find ourselves in a knowledge economy that is automating rapidly. Industries will rise and fall faster than ever and if you don’t keep adding to your human capital you will be crushed.

After you determine the things you want to avoid, your base psychology and your future desires, you need to go acquire skills. This is why the first two steps are so important. If you don’t know what you want to avoid and who you are this process of skill acquisition will be haphazard and fruitless.

You will need a core skill that serves as the guiding light for your other skills. For example, my key skillset is data analysis due to my background in biochemistry. I was able to pivot that skillset to digital marketing because of how data-rich that field is. Through that skill acquisition I can now amplify my voice online and transition to a location-independent entrepreneur.

That sequence of personal development would never have happened if I had not first gone through the first two tiers of this pyramid.

Before I went through the first two phases of the pyramid, I was on a course to be a typical career man. I was able to utilize what I learned to pivot my life and construct a career that was much more suited to my preferences.

The Pinnacle: Skill Refinement

Have you selected your skills? Good, that was just the beginning. Now comes the real work. You need to start actively honing these skills to increase your value. Only through this work can you achieve what you want in life.

Anyone who tells you that getting what you want out of life is easy most likely has their eyes on your wallet. It is difficult. It requires perseverance and knowledge about where you want to go.

Although it is easier than ever to start a business, that does not mean that it is easier to achieve your goals. You must actively hone your skills so that you can offer the most value to the marketplace.

Always remember this: you don’t get paid because you are a special snowflake. You get paid because you provide value to people. You are at the mercy of the marketplace and the only way for you to get what you truly want in life is to satisfy the needs of other people.

Harness your self-interest to cultivate massive amounts of value and then leverage the value you provide to make your own dreams come true.

I recently received my certification from the Primal Blueprint nutrition program. I am currently working on a program for you guys but for now, I thought that I would share my journey to this point.

While I was in university, I became obsessed with turning my body into a walking, talking biochemistry lab. I tried just about anything and everything to optimize my body and mind.

I ran through a string of diets and exercise programs. All of them were variations on a theme

Protein and a slow digesting carbohydrate, like oatmeal, for breakfast

A bland protein with steamed vegetables for lunch

Repeat lunch for dinner, but don’t forget the starch

The workouts would simply rearrange the reps, frequency of training, etc. but the core still focused around isolation lifts

I kept this pattern up for probably two years. It is a pattern that no doubt many of you are familiar with. It seemed to me that no matter the combination of workout and diet, I could never break through the 195lb barrier. All of this led up to the point where I was pretty frustrated that I couldn’t get to the weight goals I wanted.